Monopoly Review

Written by: Steve Martin Posted: 25th November 2008

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Monopoly Nintnedo Wii review

Monopoly Details:

	Mini-game Compilation
	Nintendo Wii
	EA Games
	EA Games

Out Now

1-4

Monopoly is the classic property trading board game, usually it comes out of the cupboard at Christmas, Easter or summer holidays when you have family, friends or the kids are off school. It’s a simple game to play and relies mainly upon luck! But it’s still great when you bankrupt poor old granddad and your mother is rotting in jail. But how well does all this transfer over into a computer version...well generally pretty well actually.

There are two main modes of play, the classic Monopoly mode, where the game is exactly like the popular board game, or the new richest mode. The Monopoly mode is just as expected; you can play with up to 4 players, with the computer making up the full quota of players if you don’t have enough friends. You can customise the rules to your liking, including the amount of cash you start the game with and the amount you must pay to bail yourself out of jail. The game then practically plays itself, with you just having to decide if you want to buy a property when you land on it. At the end of your turn you are given the chance to go to the accounts menu where you can buy houses or hotels if you have a complete set or put forward trade offers to the other players. The game then continues until all but one player is bankrupt, and this player is declared the winner.

The Richest mode of play is very different, there is no cash to worry about in this game, and it’s even more reliant on luck! The game is played in rounds. You can select 6, 9 or 12 rounds of play depending on how long you want the game to last. At the beginning of each round, 4 dice are rolled; one for each player, the number on the dice decides how many of your cards you are given, so if you choose 6, you will receive 6 cards. There is a card for each space on the Monopoly board, and a token is placed on each of the spaces you receive a card for, so to carry on from the example before you will have 6 tokens on the board on the spaces shown on the 6 cards you were given.

Once all the players have chosen their dice and their tokens have been placed on the board; Mr Monopoly will then walk all around the board starting at the Go space and stopping at every space that contains a token. If you land on an un-owned property you will automatically own that property, and the amount it is worth is added to your bank balance. If you have a token on a property that is owned by another player, then you must pay that player rent, which means you must give them one of the properties you currently own. Community Chest spaces allow you steal property from other players or move your tokens around the board and other things to give you an advantage. The Go space allows you to select any un-owned property to add to your portfolio, the Free Parking space means you are exempt from paying rent for the rest of the round, the Go To Jail space means you go to jail and must give 3 properties back to the bank to pay your bail. The Income Tax and Super Tax spaces require you to give a number of properties back to the bank to pay the tax due. If you manage to complete a set of properties, you can build houses on them by landing on one of the properties in the set or by landing on a Chance space.

Properties with houses or hotels mean that if an opposing player lands on them it will cost them more properties in rent. Writing this down makes it out to be a complicated game, its really not and most of this is all done automatically with you just having to pick the property to give your opponents in rent every now and again, but it does show the luck aspect of the game! So what’s the point in this mode you may ask, well at the beginning of every round to decide what order the players choose their dice, a mini game is randomly selected, the order in which the players complete the mini game determines the order in which players may choose their dice. The mini games themselves range from rubbish luck based ones such as Sale of Stock, where you have to guess whether the stock price will rise or fall on the graph over time, to the average action based ones such as Pay Doctors Fee, which has you shaking the remote to make Mr Monopoly run after an ambulance that he has fallen out of. You can also play these mini games separate from the Richest mode, by selecting Mini-games on the main menu.

The winner is the player with the highest bank balance (or the most property usually) after the set number of rounds. To be honest, I would stick to the Monopoly mode! I know that the developers are trying to give the game more variety, but if you buy this game it’s going to be for the main Monopoly mode not this bonus mode!

Every property you own in either mode will earn you a stamp in your passport, as you fill this passport you will receive new boards to play on ranging from the Future Board to the Cheese Board and the Cardboard Board. None are that inspiring, so you’ll probably best sticking to the original board, although each board has its own tokens to choose from such as on the Sweet Board you can be a gingerbread man or a boiled sweet.

There are a few things that let this game down, firstly when you go to the accounts menu in the Monopoly mode, the text in the middle of the screen where you can select to buy houses or mortgage a property and on the property cards is tiny and occasionally illegible, also in this menu you have a zoomed out view of the board making it difficult to find the property your after, because to trade you must click the properties you want to use in the trade using your remote as a pointer.

The computer players are also far to eager to help each other out and give each other sets even on the easy difficulty, but will spurn most of your sensible offers. This makes it very difficult to actually win the game.

The graphics in general are nothing special; it is basic at best, with Mr Monopoly being the only real animation in the whole game. The mini games are reminiscent of Flash-based internet games, all two-dimension in terms of graphics and initiative.

The background music is just about bearable; Mr Monopoly on the other hand deserves to be shot! His constant comments about how well you’re playing or what each space means gets very annoying very quickly and there is no option to turn him off! To roll the dice you must shake the remote, which activates the sound of rolling dice through your remote speaker, and then press A to release the dice. This is quite cool at first but becomes irritating after a while and again there is no option to disable this feature.

To conclude, it’s an average port of a classic board game where there is not enough interaction to keep you interested in the long term. The unfair AI will frustrate you, and so the best bet is to play only when there are 4 human players to make it fair, but it would still be a better idea to dig out the board game rather than this game, as it is generally more fun and you can play with more than 4 players. Granted you can play this on your own, but who would want to! The Richest mode and the mini games do not bulk this game out enough to recommend a purchase unless you’re a Monopoly fanatic.